When Brewery Bhavana opened this year in Raleigh, North Carolina, the Nolintha siblings behind the project treated its 100-person staff to a pot of rice congee.

The porridge-like soup, says Vansana (Van) Nolintha, is “a love letter, an act of reverence to a cooking tradition that has been there for a long time.” Congee’s history dates back to 2500BC; it’s also the food that Van learned to cook for his sister Vanvisa when they arrived in the United States two decades ago as children. Today, the dish represents their journey from Laos, and their parents, to this place where they have blossomed. As Van describes it, with a bowl of congee, “you can still make it home.”

The Nolintha siblings own two restaurants in Raleigh. Their first, Bida Manda, translates to “father and mother” and serves traditional Laotian dishes as Van and Vanvisa interpret them now, after almost two decades in their new home. Their second restaurant, Brewery Bhavana, was named Bon Appetit’snumber 10 best restaurant in America this year and features a brewery overseen by co-owner Patrick Woodson, a bookstore run by Monica Jon, and a flower shop managed by Deana Nguyen.

Keith Isaacs Photo

Dim sum at Brewery Bhavana

The Nolinthas hired a dim sum chef for Bhavana, Chun Si, to curate and execute an impressive menu of traditional and reimagined Chinese street and celebration foods, like dumplings, bao, and mooncakes. But the siblings added their own precious tradition to the menu: rice congee. “Rice is very sacred in our culture,” says Van. “When you greet someone, instead of saying hello, you ask ‘Have you had rice today?’”

He points to his sister, who stands over a pot of rice that simmers on their kitchen stove. It’s a mid-November day, one of the first to hint at winter in North Carolina. Van is off today, but Vanvisa begins her shift at 4 p.m. They’re trying to get in a quick lunch together at their newly moved-in house just blocks from work. Everything amps up around the holidays, and the Nolinthas’ first hosted Thanksgiving is on the horizon. They’re excited about opening their home and cooking traditional side dishes to friends and chosen family in Raleigh, but are leaving the turkey to a professional—James Beard award-winning chef Ashley Christensen offered to drop one off.

Vanvisa swirls a wooden spoon, coaxing the boil to a slow pace. “It’s so amazing that she’s the main cook of the house now,” Van says. As the older brother, he was the one who cooked for her when they were kids, alone in the States without their parents.

When Vansana (Van) Nolintha arrived to North Carolina in 1998, he was twelve years old and knew just three things about America: pizza, the film Titanic, and the Golden Gate bridge. “I remember [my aunt’s] photographs of her beautiful home on the hill and the foggy, hopeful Golden Gate bridge. Funny that, even at that age, America expressed to me clearly a song of liberty, freedom and inclusiveness.”

Van landed on the east coast, though, in Greensboro, to live with family friends who owned a Japanese restaurant. He slept on the floor in a crowded but warm household, adopting a new family and way of life and preparing for his eleven-year-old sister, Vanvisa, to arrive the next year.

Rice congee simmers for hours. One cup of dry rice can feed a family if you let it expand long enough. The siblings just returned from a trip to Laos, but their parents have only visited them as adults once, last year, after more than 17 years apart. That’s how long it took them to get a tourist visa. He remembers after their first visit to Greensboro, when he and his sister were younger, his mother forgot her jacket. He cried into it at night, inhaling her scent and “knowing that it was fading.”

After graduating college with a degree in hospitality, Vanvisa sold her white VW beetle and made plans to move back to Laos and work with her parents. But, in the end, she decided to stay and open Bida Manda with her brother (he graduated with a degree in design). “I felt some sort of selfishness,” Vanvisa says of that decision. She is the youngest in the family and the only girl. “I sometimes feel like I should not be here, but my heart is also here.”

Music plays from the living room, Leon Bridges' “River” blending into the quite gurgling of the rice. Earlier, Van had told me, “I knew I had to cook Mom’s food [for Vanvisa] because she wouldn’t remember home. These foods are not on our menu because they were fusion or even easy to love.”

The restaurant includes a small, carefully curated bookstore. Photo by Keith Isaacs

The rice congee has become a favorite menu item at Bhavana. It’s served with chicken (at home, they cook with pork meatballs) along with Laotian accompaniments: chili oil, soy sauce, fresh ginger. Van says it’s their soul food, and that customers have gravitated toward the dish. “People taste it and it feels familiar immediately. There’s something about soul food that transcends cultures.”

Both Van and Vanvisa exude a fierce independence and a mindfulness that translates to their restaurants. While most kitchens are chaotic and aggressive, the back-of-the-house spaces at Bida Manda and Bhavana are as comforting as their menus. In the dining room, tables are scattered with bamboo baskets, and diners share plates of whole fish and duck.

“Imagine if we didn’t have the medium of telling [our parents’] stories, loving them and caring for them, through these places,” Van says of his restaurants. “Imagine if their story wasn’t such a pronounced part of who we are today.”

Looking for a comforting congee recipe?

If you don’t want to make the chicken stock from scratch for this congee recipe, simmering some store-bought broth with a few slices of bacon and ginger for 20 minutes or so will give you a huge head-start on flavor.